March 25, 2004 should have been a day to savour for Lesley Swinn - the day the ambitious 38-year-old opened the second branch of her estate agency. But instead of being excited and proud she felt tired and racked with guilt. Two months later she was at the end of her tether.

"Outwardly I looked composed. Inside I was stressed and running out of steam. I was doing my best but just reacting to things - overwhelmed, out of control. I had no strategy, I was working hideous hours, I wasn't sleeping and I wasn't seeing my son."

She needed help, but felt she didn't have the time to spare for counselling or therapy. An acquaintance recommended she try something called "solutions focused coaching" - or, as it is also known, solution-focused brief therapy (SFT). "I was wary and maybe a bit cynical, but I was desperate, so I gave it a go."

The first, hour-long meeting was face to face, but the five subsequent sessions were done over the phone. "It was perfect. It took up hardly any time. I was expecting someone to provide me with answers. Instead I very quickly discovered that I already had all the answers myself."

Within weeks she had reorganised the way she was working and had arranged her life so she was back in control. "I was more strategic, and I was more productive. My relationship with my husband improved and most importantly I found a lot more time to spend with my son."

To good to be true? Ever since Freud made "talking cures" popular, the accepted wisdom has been that if you haven't got almost unlimited time and cash to pay for an open-ended rumination on the subject of yourself, you're wasting your time.

But according to the supporters of SFT, it's the open-ended inquiry that is actually a waste of time. SFT promises to change lives with just a handful of sessions, and sometimes only one. They don't have to be face to face. You can even learn to do it to yourself.

"It's brief because it doesn't dwell on the psychological causes of problems, it simply focuses on solutions," explains Dr Alasdair Macdonald, a psychiatrist and research coordinator for the Brief Therapy Association. "Conventional therapy is about being stuck. This is about becoming unstuck."

This, then, is therapy for the era of over-worked, over-stimulated, unreflective capitalism. Counselling for the Just Do It generation.

SFT was developed in the United States in the 1980s, when therapists noticed that most conventional therapies focus on what has gone wrong in people's lives rather than what is right. Supporters of SFT say it can be applied to almost any personal issue or problem, from substance abuse (it has been approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence for use in NHS quit smoking programmes), to eating disorders and family therapy, as well as anxiety, depression and even schizophrenia.

"It's not that it's more effective than other approaches -- all claim remission rates of about 80%," says Macdonald. "It's just a lot more efficient. "SFT typically takes between three to six sessions. Conventional psychotherapy can take up to 200 sessions."

When the technique is applied to the workplace, it drops the term "therapy" and becomes "coaching" - it's less stigmatising. "We get all sorts of issues, people not knowing what to do with their careers, people who want to improve their performance, people who can't manage other people and so on," says Paul Z Jackson of coaching firm The Solutions Focus.

Apparently the one fear that consistently tops the list - above even death - is that of giving presentations. But Jackson stresses that SFT doesn't offer cures, it just helps people function better. "People worried about presentations still get butterflies after SFT. It's just that the butterflies will all be flying in the same direction."

I proposed lancing my scepticism by experiencing SFT first-hand. Jackson offered me a taste of the approach in an hour over the phone. The conversation with his partner Janine Waldman opened with the question, "What do you want to get from this session?" Speaking on behalf of all readers of Guardian Work, I volunteer the vague and generic ambition that "I want to work better and earn more money."

At the heart of SFT are three types of question. First is the "miracle" question. "Imagine there is a miracle one night and when you wake up you are working perfectly. What will be the signs? What will you notice and what will others notice?" asks Waldman.

The idea is to identify what it is you have to do to make improvements. It forced me to deconstruct the issue - how I work - and come up with a detailed definition of what "working better" means in practice.

Then we move to what they call the "scaling" questions. "On a scale of one to 10," says Waldman, "where zero is the worst it has ever been and 10 is the day after the miracle, can you remember a time when it was better? What would you have to do to move that score one point up the scale?"

The point of this question seems to be to show that first, the problem is solvable - you've nearly cracked it in the past - and second, to make you focus on things that you have done in the past to improve your situation.

Then there are the "know-how" questions, such as "What helps you to perform at your current level rather than zero? When do parts of the desired outcome happen already?" These questions are again designed to show that I already have many of the skills I need to "work better".

Throughout our hour-long session Janine emphasises all the good things I'd done in the past. Towards the end she asks me to come up with an exercise, for later, that will embody some of the things we had talked about. As it happens I choose the slightly lame and completely unrelated task of buying some tablets for my bad knee, which I had been putting off for some weeks.

It feels like a cop-out, but Janine assures me it isn't. "It doesn't matter how easy or difficult the exercise is," she says. It's a bit like when you first learn to lift weights in the gym. You do it with no weight at all because you are learning the movements and techniques," she explains.

The process of doing something - even as trivial as buying knee tablets - was, actually, quite exhilarating because I was doing it consciously. If I could be conscious and deliberate about my knee tablets, then surely I could be the same when it came to work and money?

At the end, my brain really hurt. But that's the point, says Jackson. "It's all about making you do the work. If we did it or told you the answers, you wouldn't get much out of it."

My career and income have not been revolutionised since the session, but I do feel more in control of what I am doing. And while I may only be lifting metaphorical ounces today, I know exactly what I have to do to lift hundreds of pounds in the future.

Changing pattern - do-it-yourself SFT

1 Find a comfortable, quiet place where you can think undisturbed. Take a pen and paper. Writing things down makes you order your thoughts better.

3 Ask yourself what is the benefit to you of moving forward. When you've tackled this kind of problem before, what was helpful? List what skills and resources you discovered you had. You should also list what you think has been going well.

4 Pretend that tonight in your sleep a miracle happens. This miracle will resolve whatever problem you have been thinking about. List the signs that tell you the miracle has happened. List how other people will be able to tell that a miracle has happened.

5 On a scale of zero to 10, where would you score your issue today? What helps you to perform at n on the scale, rather than zero? What did you have to do to get you that far? When does the outcome happen for you already? What do you suppose you did to make that happen? Then ask yourself: how did you do that?

6 What else needs to happen to get you to n +1? List some small steps that could improve the issue.

7 You should resolve to take that small step.

8 Once you have taken that first small step, reflect on it. How did it feel? What did you learn?

9 List on a piece of paper three things that you could do differently to ensure that your behaviour produces a different outcome next time.